In traditional society, solidarity is relatively obvious: Life is uniform and people
are similar; they share a common culture and sense of morality that Durkheim char-
acterizes as mechanical solidarity. In modern society, with its division of labor and
diverse and conflicting interests, common values are present but less obvious. People
are interdependent, and Durkheim calls this organic solidarity.
Durkheim’s influence has been immense, not only in sociology, where he ranks
with Marx and Weber as one of the founders of the discipline, but in anthropology,
social psychology, and history. Durkheim’s use of statistics was pioneering for his time,
and his concept of the “social fact,” his rigorous comparative method, and
his functional style of analysis have been widely adopted (Durkheim,
[1895] 1997). His emphasis on society as a moral entity has served as a
powerful critique of abstract individualism and rationality and of a defi-
nition of freedom that places human liberty in opposition to society.Max Weber.Max Weber (1864–1920) was an encyclopedic scholar
whose expertise left hardly a field untouched. But his chief interest in all
his studies was the extraordinary importance of “rationality” in the
modern world. His major insights were that rationality was the
foundation of modern society and that while rationality organized
society in more formal, legal, and predictable ways, it also trapped us in
an “iron cage” of bureaucracy and meaninglessness.
To understand society, Weber developed a sociology that was both
“interpretive” and “value free.” Weber’s interpretive sociology under-
stands social relationships by showing the sense they make to those who are involved
in them. Weber also insisted that experts separate their personal evaluations from their
scientific pronouncements because such value judgments cannot be logically deduced
from facts. By protecting science from the taint of ideology, Weber hoped also to pro-
tect political debate from unwarranted claims by experts. “Value freedom” does not
mean sociologists should not take political positions but that we must use value judg-
ments to select subjects deemed worthy of research and must engage with the minds
and feelings of the people being studied.
Weber’s most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904, 1905), was a study of the relationship of religious ideas to economic activity.
What made European capitalism unique, he argued, was its connection to the ideas
embodied in the Protestant Reformation, ideas that enabled individuals to act in this
world. Essentially, Weber argued that the Puritan ethic of predestination led to a deep-
seated need for clues about whether one is saved or not. Seeking some indication,
Protestants, particularly Calvinists, began to value material success and
worldly profit as signs of God’s favor.
At the end, however, Weber was pessimistic. Rationality can free us
from the theocratic past but also imprison us in an “iron cage”—an utterly
dehumanized and mechanized world. Like Marx, Weber believed that the
modern capitalist order brought out the worst in us. “In the field of its
highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped
of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with
purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character
of sport.”
And like Marx, Weber believed that, in the long run, class was the most
significant division among people. But Weber had a more complicated
understanding. At any one moment, he wrote, there are other, less eco-
nomic, factors that divide people from each other, as well as unite them into
groups. To class, Weber added the idea of “status” and “party.” “Party”
referred to voluntary organizations that people would enter together to18 CHAPTER 1WHAT IS SOCIOLOGY?Max Weber introduced purely
social processes, like charisma
and status, as sources of
identity and inequality. n
Weber began the work on The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalismwhen he
was invited to give a lecture at the World’s
Fair in St. Louis in 1900. He stopped off in
Philadelphia to read some of Benjamin
Franklin’s papers and believed he had
discovered the kernel of the spirit of
capitalism. All his major works appeared
after he returned from that trip.Didyouknow